United States universities are imposing ‘police state’ rules in an attempt to avoid a repeat of campus protests against Israel’s genocidal war on Gaza, with students and faculties warning of the chilling effect such bans would have on free speech.
As the summer break comes to an end, university administrations across the United States are imposing tougher measures to avoid a new wave of campus protests, which led to nationwide police crackdowns on campuses last semester.
Large protest encampments set up last semester eventually ended after a nationwide police crackdown on campuses in different US universities led to more than 3,100 arrests.
Scores of students faced criminal charges and disciplinary measures, and several schools scaled back graduation ceremonies for protesting against the Israeli war which has killed more than 40,000 Palestinians so far.
Columbia University students, who were in the vanguard of the movement, may encounter the most changes.
The university president, Minouche Shafik, resigned last week in the wake of criticism of her handling of the protests, but not before overseeing the installation of fencing around the lawns of the school’s quad – the heart of campus life and the site of large protest encampments.
Shafik announced her resignation in an email to the university community last Wednesday after little more than a year into the job, becoming the third president of an Ivy League university to step down in the wake of the campus protests against the Gaza war.
The university faced criticism for its heavy-handed tactics against pro-Palestinian students protesting the genocide in Gaza. Shafik authorised New York police to move on to campus and break up the encampments, claiming the protesting students posed ‘a clear and present danger to the substantial functioning of the university.’
Hundreds of faculty members issued statements condemning Shafik’s tactics, and walked out in support of their students. Since then, she has come under growing pressure to step down over her role in the crackdown.
Shafik, a former head of the London School of Economics and ex-World Bank official, has declared her intention to return to the UK.
The student protest group Columbia Students for Justice in Palestine welcomed the resignation on social media network X, saying:
‘After months of chanting “Minouche Shafik you can’t hide” she finally got the memo. To be clear, any future president who does not pay heed to the Columbia student body’s overwhelming demand for divestment will end up exactly as President Shafik did,’ the group wrote.
According to the Wall Street Journal, university administrators are also considering bringing in ‘peace officers’ with the authority to arrest students – something Columbia’s current 290 security personnel cannot do.
In an email sent to students last month, the administration also announced a ‘colour-coded campus status’ system, with varying levels of access restrictions ‘based upon the potential disruption to our academic mission and/or campus operations.’
To further confront protesting students, some universities have banned the use of ‘event tents, tables, walls, outdoor displays, inflatables, freestanding signs, huts, sculptures, booths, facilities, flashing or rotating lights, illuminated signs, or similar objects and structures.’
‘The war is still there… nothing has changed in Palestine,’ said Jonathan Ben-Menachem, a sociology PhD student who participated in the Columbia University students’ campus protests.
He said universities’ efforts to quash the protests when students return from summer vacation will fail.
‘It’s going to be more of a police state than it was, but I don’t think that means no one’s going to do anything,’ the graduate student pointed out.
Human rights advocates and student activists as well as university faculty members have sounded the alarm about the new policies, warning that the restrictions, in addition to endangering free speech, run counter to educational institutions’ mission to foster debate, risk deepening tensions on campuses, and – in the case of public universities – may run foul of schools’ constitutional obligations.
Last week, the American Association of University Professors issued a statement condemning the harsh anti-protesting rules at universities.
The tougher new rules ‘impose severe limits on speech and assembly that discourage or shut down freedom of expression’, wrote the group, which represents more than 44,000 faculty members nationwide.
‘Those who care about higher education and democracy should be alarmed.’
- The only way to end the ongoing Israeli genocidal war on Gaza is for the US to halt its weapons shipments to the regime, says a US-based Pulitzer-prize winning journalist, author and activist.
In a post on X, formerly Twitter, Chris Hedges said there is ‘only one way’ to end the genocidal war that has claimed more than 40,000 lives and it is ‘not through bilateral negotiations’.
‘Israel has amply demonstrated, including with the assassination of the lead Hamas negotiator, Ismail Haniyeh, that it has no interest in a permanent ceasefire,’ he wrote.
‘The only way for Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians to be halted is for the US to end all weapons shipments to Israel. And the only way this will take place is if enough Americans make clear they have no intention of supporting any presidential ticket or any political party that fuels this genocide.’
Hedges, who worked as a foreign correspondent for the New York Times, the National Public Radio and other prominent news organisations for nearly two decades, has been very critical of the US’ complicity in the Israeli genocidal war against Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
According to the latest data shared by the Palestinian health ministry, the death toll from the genocidal war has risen to 40,099 apart from 92,610 injured.
Thousands more are still trapped under the rubble, presumed dead.
‘If we do not hold fast to moral imperatives, we are doomed. Evil will triumph. It means there is no right and wrong. It means anything, including mass murder, is permissible,’ Hedges wrote on X.
He said the ongoing protests outside the Democratic National Convention at the United Center in Chicago ‘demand an end to the genocide and US aid to Israel.
‘Hope lies in the streets,’ he stated, referring to the growing number of anti-genocide protests. ‘A moral stance always has a cost. If there is no cost, it is not moral. It is merely conventional belief…’
He hastened to add that the question is not whether resistance is practical, but whether it is right.
‘We are enjoined to love our neighbour, not our tribe. We must have faith that the good draws to it the good, even if the empirical evidence around us is bleak,’ Hedges wrote.
‘The good is always embodied in action. It must be seen. It does not matter if the wider society is censorious. We are called to defy – through acts of civil disobedience and noncompliance – the laws of the state, when these laws, as they often do, conflict with moral law.’
The Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist urged people to ‘stand’ for Palestine ‘no matter the cost’.
‘If we fail to take this stand, whether against the abuses of militarised police, the inhumanity of our vast prison system or the genocide in Gaza, we become the crucifiers.’
